


The Tune Your Bones Play (as you keep going)

by embroiderama



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Death, Future Fic, Gen, Illnesses, Older Characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-27
Updated: 2011-07-27
Packaged: 2017-10-21 20:28:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/229486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embroiderama/pseuds/embroiderama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 2063, Sam sits at Dean's bedside and thinks about the decades that have gone by, the things that have changed and the things that have stayed the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tune Your Bones Play (as you keep going)

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the [](http://hoodie-time.livejournal.com/profile)[**hoodie_time**](http://hoodie-time.livejournal.com/) tags challenge, prompt: pneumonia. The title is from Mark Strand's poem ["Lines for Winter"](http://embroiderama.livejournal.com/148474.html). Thank you to [](http://writingpathways.livejournal.com/profile)[**writingpathways**](http://writingpathways.livejournal.com/) and [](http://saberivojo.livejournal.com/profile)[**saberivojo**](http://saberivojo.livejournal.com/) for looking it over for me.

The hospital room is full of equipment Sam only vaguely recognizes--state of the art, he supposes. Lori wouldn't stand for Dean to be in anything but the best hospital, but sometimes Sam misses the days when he could at least pretend to understand what was going on in a hospital room, when he could steal a white coat and a badge, when he could smile and bluff his way through anything.

That was a young man's game, and Sam doesn't have the energy for it anymore. If Dean has any more fake IDs they're crumbling in a box somewhere, with the keys to the Impala. Things change, and Sam's had decades for that lesson to sink in but still sometimes it takes him by surprise--the way the world changes, the way his face looks, a wrinkled stranger in the mirror. The way Lori's oldest girl, the one who's learning how to drive and taking college-level physics, looks more like Dean every year.

Even after so many years, Sam finds himself surprised when he thinks about their family now, family that never knew the grind of life on the road, never knew the taste of rock salt and cordite in the night air, never knew demons or angels or the kind of deals that could be made with either. Dean's daughter has heard a few stories, long ago found some of the old books they inherited from Bobby, but none of it was real to her.

Lori's children only know that their poppop had been a mechanic, that their great uncle Sam had been a traveling salesman before he got in an accident and had to retire. The same old ruse his dad had used, just the same.

Other things are the same, too. Since Lori took the kids home for the night, it's just Sam and Dean, the two of them just like it had been for so many years. If Sam closes his eyes, he can pretend that the aches in his body are from some hunt gone wrong, that he's only sitting because the hour is late, that his legs still work the way they're supposed to. Even with his eyes open, much is the same as the scenes that haunt his memory--the mask over Dean's face, the tube coming up from the mask, the way the bed makes him look so small. The wheeze of the machine as it forces Dean's lungs to expand and contract.

That's another thing that hasn’t changed. Medical science has come far, rolling forward the way it always does, but some things still can't be fixed. There are expensive new antibiotics, and some of them even work most of the time. There are tests and scans and fancy machines to monitor what's going on inside a person's body. But still, still none of them can halt the slow process of a man drowning in the rising tide of fluid inside his own lungs, none of them can push oxygen into a body if even the respirator can't make the lungs move enough air.

None of them--no modern medicine, no loving family--could make a stubborn old man go to the doctor when he first got a bad cough rather than waiting until he collapsed in the living room, chest wheezing from the pneumonia that was already sunk deep down inside. So Sam sits holding his brother's hand the same way he had when Dean was fifteen and had his appendix out, when he was too out of it to remember he was too cool to hold hands.

The night before, the nurses had told him to leave, tried to chivvy him out of the room for his own good as much as Dean's, so they said. But even at eighty years old, even with his hands wrapped around the frame of a walker--the goddamn walker he's been using for a few months since the cane stopped being enough to keep him on his feet --Sam Winchester is not about to be pushed around. He's not quite as tall as he was, his shoulders not quite so broad, but he's still the man who stood firm against things more far frightening than people in scrubs.

He's staying the night. He's staying as long as Dean does.

Late into the night, Sam's bent over, trying to stretch out his sore back, when he feels somebody watching him. He sits up to see Dean awake, his eyes as clear as they've been since he was admitted. He can't talk, the tube in his throat muting him, but Sam can read his eyes clearly enough.

 _I'm fucked,_ they say. _I'm really fucked this time, Sammy._

Sam hauls himself to his feet, one hand on the railing of the bed, the other gripping Dean's hand tight. "You remember that field?"

Dean's forehead scrunches up, the deep wrinkle between his eyes folding in on itself.

"The field with the fireworks. Up there. You told me about it." Sam can still remember when it was real, riding out to that field with Dean, how awesome Dean had seemed at eighteen. How grown-up, how strong.

Dean's face goes soft, and his fingers twitch against Sam's.

"I want you to wait for me there. The Impala's on the side of the road, right? She'll be full of gas, enough to drive forever. And all those old tapes of yours, remember those?"

Dean's eyes crinkle with the hint of a smile, even while Sam feels tears pressing at the back of his own. He won't cry. He's still the kid who was brought up by John Winchester, and he won't do that to Dean.

"I want you to wait for me there. Just set off fireworks, as many as you want, and after a while we can go anywhere. The Grand Canyon, right?" Sam clears his throat, wishes for a real beer, or some whiskey. He'd stopped drinking when Dean did; it's been a long time, longer than Lori has been alive. "I miss that old passenger seat, you know?"

Dean nods, a tiny hint of motion all that the equipment surrounding him allows.

"Wait for me there. I don't--" Sam looks down at his hands, all wrinkles and veins and stringy muscles. "I don't think you'll have all that long to wait."

When Sam looks back up, Dean's eyes are closed, his face relaxed. The electronic throb of the heart monitor screen continues its unsteady rhythm. Sam lowers himself back down into the chair, his butt hitting the seat just ahead of his back and knees giving out.

He doesn't think that either of them have very long to wait.


End file.
